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Will AI bring back beauty?
Looking at midjourney's top pieces of art I am struck by the beauty in them. They contain detail, high degrees of realism even when depicting surrealist themes. They tend to be symmetrical and often portray idealized versions of reality. AI art tends to portray archetypal depicitions of its motifs and often excludes blemmishes, dirt and grime.
Compare it with corporate memphis a primarily human generated art form that has gained significant traction in the public space in the past decade. This is the most expensive painting painted by a living woman.
Compare the buildings drawn by the AI with the best exterior of 2022 in Sweden according to architects.
AI gives people what it gets positive feedback from. It gives people what they want. People want visually stunning rather than the output of the art community.
Currently, it is popular to hold that AI will soon be able to do everything. If this is the case, it trivially follows that it will be able to "bring back beauty" too - not to say that it would, but simply that it could do so, among many other things. Ignoring hypothetical scenarios of godhood however, I currently see no evidence that AI is advancing the cause of beauty in any meaningful way, and indeed I only see evidence that AI is contributing to its increasingly rapid erosion.
Your last sentence seems to indicate that you embrace the following distinction, common enough in popular discourse: on the one hand we have "the people", who are in touch with "true beauty" (either because they understand it intuitively, or maybe because true beauty just is whatever the people want, or however you want to explain it); and then on the other hand we have "the art community", who, for reasons unknown, have chosen to make a bunch of ugly crap that doesn't mean anything to anyone and has no worth.
I don't wish to defend the current art establishment tout court - they really do make a lot of crap that doesn't mean anything to anyone and has no worth. We agree on that much. But still, I think those high-falutin' art snobs do get some things right (it would be weird if they were so dysfunctional that they got everything exactly wrong). I want to take this opportunity to respond to (what I think is) your conception of beauty, and explain some of my reasons for dissenting from it, as someone who's coming from "the other side of the fence" so to speak.
What really first unlocked my thinking on issues like this is the idea of comparing work in the arts to academic work in other fields. You can imagine a physicist who thinks that classical mechanics is just like, the shit - and not even the parts of classical mechanics that are still the subject of active research like chaotic systems, but specifically stuff like Newton's original laws of motion. He just only wants to solve high school physics problems all day, maybe collect some observations that confirm your standard high school physics equations, and... that's it. And if anyone tells him that if he wants to stay relevant and get grant money, he really should consider working on contemporary problems in string theory or condensed matter, he just responds with "nah, you lost me with all that abstract modern stuff; I'm only into the real good stuff, the classical stuff".
Everyone would think that he was rather missing the point and that he wasn't living up to his proper function as a physicist. The proper job of a physicist is to discover and invent new things, not just repeat what's already been said. This is a reasonable standard to hold for most intellectual activity, and the "art cabal" simply thinks that it should hold for art as well. Yes, that's a very fine painting of a sunny landscape/a woman in a trad dress/Jesus being crucified/whatever, we all agree that it's quite nice, but it's not new. We already know how to paint things like that and make them "beautiful". It's well-trodden territory, it presents no conceptual challenges, it has no capacity to surprise or perplex. It was new at one point - it used to be crucial, cutting-edge work - but now it is no longer new, and there comes a point where you simply have to move on.
Venturing into what is new and unexplored in art will inevitably bring us into contact with all that belongs to the tragic dimension of life - loss, regret, ambiguity, disconcerting feelings of all sorts, in other words all that an untrained eye will initially consider to be "ugly". But such a circuitous route can in fact reveal to us new types of beauty that remained invisible at an earlier stage of development. One of my favorite examples of this sort of "finding of light in the darkness" has always been The Ambassadors by Holbein the Younger - I could have selected a really out-there example to really drive the point home, like say, pretty much anything by Jeff Koons, but The Ambassadors works well as an example because the painting has a foot in "both worlds". It's an immaculately executed work of traditional realism, but it also gestures towards something strange and unsettling.
The painting's claim to notoriety is the giant distorted skull floating in the middle of what is otherwise a physically ordinary scene, seemingly unexplained. I think it is crucial that we take the flat 2D representation of the painting at face value; of course the trick is that the skull is anamorphic, and that if you stand in front of the painting from the right angle then the skull will appear as a full 3D object and will no longer be distorted, but this is one case where looking at a photograph on Wikipedia is actually better than seeing the painting in a gallery. In my view, the distortion of the skull is crucial for the overall aesthetic effect of the painting. Innumerable questions immediately present themselves: who are these guys? Where are they? No seriously, why is that skull there? Why is it compressed and slanted? It looks like it's kind of floating a bit? Does it even exist on the same plane of reality as the rest of the scene? The more you think about it, the more claustrophobic you start to feel - and of course there must be no comforting answer that the skull is "just" an anamorphic illusion that the painter included as a memento mori for discerning observers; that would deflate the tension, and above all our goal is to preserve the tension.
This sort of experience comes close to describing for me, not only beauty as such, but the aesthetic experience as such - this dawning realization, as you puzzle more and more and your attention gets more and more diverted, of "...what is that?". This is the experience that "aesthetic adrenaline junkies" are always chasing after, this feeling that you just got your head rearranged by the work. What separates kitsch, decoration, finery, mere objects, from capital-A Art, is that the former tend towards producing a reaction of "ah, that's nice". Art, on the other hand, "cuts into you", as Todd McGowan succinctly put it, the same way that the skull cuts into Holbein's painting. It's not supposed to be all sunshine and roses. It's supposed to take something from you at the same time that it gives.
Anyway to answer your question the answer is "no", plebs using AI to fill up the world with pictures of epic viking dudes staring straight into the camera is as far removed from beauty as the worst atrocities of the modern MFA/gallery system.
But the reason it's cringeworthy to pursue only classical physics problems is not just that they've already been done... but that physics is about achieving physical mastery over reality. We have clockwork and Newton effectively locked down, we have general relativity and now we try to shrink transistors (ignoring what the particle physics have been doing, spending lots of money on with few returns for the last few decades). Physics has the promise to provide energy, bombs, computing power, better rockets and so on. The grant money is for opening up new territory that has resources in it. In maths, there are also returns - cryptographic and algorithmic and so on.
Art doesn't provide returns like that. Art only has to inspire emotions in people. Novelty does not improve this, in and of itself. It's not as though we've locked down all the poems and are moving on to poems 2. There are plenty of poems left to be written, plenty of landscapes and storms to make paintings about.
Indeed physics has been mired in an excessive search for novelty for some time now. String theory has not produced any returns. It might be mathematically interesting and novel but it's not powering anything new. It provides employment to physicists and allows for many papers to be written. But it doesn't achieve the fundamental goal of physics. Likewise, putting three basketballs in a tank or making a stainless steel balloon dog is not art.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Three_Ball_Total_Equilibrium_Tank_by_Jeff_Koons%2C_Tate_Liverpool.jpg/440px-Three_Ball_Total_Equilibrium_Tank_by_Jeff_Koons%2C_Tate_Liverpool.jpg
http://www.jeffkoons.com/artwork/celebration/balloon-dog-0
Art must do more than confuse people. The Sydney Modern art gallery's $344 million expansion is a glorified convention centre - lots of empty space, little 'art' and almost no art. It's a place for people who want to look sophisticated to organize functions.
Is that true?
If we could inspire the same emotions by taking the relevant pills, would art be redundant?
Really the premise is a bit self-defeating. If art is meant to inspire emotion, it's meant to make you think. Something that sticks around in your head and makes you think will generate much more complex and long-lasting emotion than a simple aesthetic achievement.
Not only that, but there are important things much more important than emotion which art aspires to capture. Who cares about a moment of appreciation when you could induce a character change in someone and alter the course of their life? That is, I think, the true purpose of art--to change us--and other claimed purposes such as "to make us feel something" or "to make us think" are just gesturing towards smaller, less ambitious versions of its true purpose.
When I listen to a classical symphony, it doesn’t inspire change or really any ideation in me at all. It’s a pure aesthetic experience, designed to manipulate my emotions and make me feel enjoyment and awe. There’s no intellectual content there, no lasting alteration in my patterns of conscious thought, no epistemic or philosophical updates on offer. Do you believe that this makes classical music “not art”? Or is it art that is failing at its one true purpose? Did Beethoven just not understand that he was supposed to be changing people’s minds, rather than simply making something beautiful for them?
I don't accept the premise that any experience is incapable of producing change. Any awe you feel while listening to music will inescapably color your behavior throughout the day to some extent, and possibly make you see things in a slightly different light.
This is of course not limited to art, but I think the value of things in general is based on how they affect and change us. If art were purely aesthetic experience, with no lasting changes to attitude, perspective, philosophy, mood, etc. then I would find it valueless, yes. Luckily such an experience is impossible. Everything we do and experience changes us to some extent, or else it's no better than wireheading and should be discounted entirely.
Every year on my birthday, I eat a delicious piece of salted caramel cheesecake, as a treat. It’s pure sugar and fat, an indulgence of atavistic hungers programmed in me by evolution. It’s orgasmically delicious in the moment, but also terrible for me, which is why I do it once a year. Is there intellectual content in my consumption of the cheesecake? Does it “produce a change in me”? Is the cheesecake art? It is a physical artifact produced by hand by a human being, with the intention of generating an emotional/aesthetic experience in the consumer. Like a classical symphony, it produces a transitory, evanescent sense of elation in me. (Thank God Beethoven’s 9th Symphony doesn’t put 1,300 calories of pure junk food into my body every time I listen to it.)
I used to draw a distinction between “art” and “entertainment”, using an exclusive definition of art the way you are now. Over time, though, I accepted that the distinction is illusory, and that there is nothing wrong with consuming content that is designed purely to excite me aesthetically and to cater to my current preferences, rather than to alter them.
I suppose I'm trying to remove the distinction from art and entertainment from the other direction--by saying that all entertainment is art, rather than that all art is entertainment. Would you eat the cheesecake if you knew that afterwards you'd forget eating it? I think even for the very most carnal pleasures (besides drugs) most of the enjoyment we get from them is still from the meaning we derive from them.
That said, at this point "art" doesn't really seem to be what I'm talking about, so I agree with your point to an extent. I don't know if I could truly define what art is, but I can say that it's not just to make us feel something and then that's the end of it.
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